The development blog of the Indie game, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox.

Please note that all screen shots displayed in this blog are works in progress and in no way represent the appearance of the final game. Check out the main site here.

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Sunday, February 12, 2012

O RLY? YA RLY!

So we've had a few people start to realise why we're so excited about this game, and it's to do with the infinite game world... So we thought we should write up this blog entry to explain it a bit further...

So you've been seeing lots of "overworld" stuff in the game, like this:

And you're possibly thinking to yourself "Wow, that's really well designed! It's very pretty!" but it wasn't designed by us....

You may have also seen the dungeons, like this:

And thought "Very cool! That's a well-designed dungeon! Very labyrinthine". But, once again, it wasn't made by us...

The truth is that the GAME ENGINE is what made these levels. We have no level designer on the team, as our procedural engine that we've written builds the world for us. Towns, dungeons, countryside... It's all made by the game, and it does this INFINITELY.

But let me clarify that...

We've had a lot of people think that when we say "infinite world" we mean "randomly generated world". This is not the case. Everyone who plays Malevolence will experience the same world as everyone else who plays Malevolence, just in the same way that everyone who plays Skyrim plays in the same world as everyone else who plays Skyrim. It's not an MMO, it's singleplayer, however everyone is in a copy of the same world. That world, however, is genuinely infinite.

We can already hear a lot of you going:

So let me give you this example... Let's say that two people, each with their own computer, install Malevolence, start a new game (both, coincidentally starting in the same location), both walk North for a million miles, then both turn East and walk for another million miles. When they stop walking, they'll both be in EXACTLY the same place. If there is a town there, they will both be in that town. If there's a tavern there called The Stinky Pomegranate, they'll BOTH see the Stinky Pomegranate.

So if you have Malevolence, and a friend of yours has Malevolence, and you find a PARTICULARLY awesome dungeon, you can tell your friend Bobby Joe about it and where to find it (no matter HOW far you've traveled to find it yourself) and if he follows your directions he will be able to find it himself.
Loot, on the other hand, is spawned based on a time coefficient, so it will be harder to direct people to a particular item. But you'll be able to direct people to any NPC, town, dungeon, crypt, mountain, ocean, island, or any fixed thing like that.

And yes, throughout all of this, it's infinite.

"Impossible!!!" you say? Well, it's actually working just fine, but it's all in raw data format so it's quite boring to look at. All we're doing now is going through and attaching the 3D world to it (the easy part, comparatively)

Are you of a more technically minded nature and would like to know a bit more about how it's done? Then feel free to read this blog article we did about it. We don't go into TOO much detail (naturally, we don't want everyone stealing our technology) but it should give you enough of an outline to let you know that we're not TOTALLY crazy (just a little)

And remember, you can follow more regular updates on this game (as well of heaps of extra stuff not shown on the blogs) by following us on the social networks!

Also, for something different... Would you like to help out the project with a donation? It's easy to do, thanks to PayPal! You don't have to, of course, but to scavenging indies like us, every little bit helps!
All you have to do is visit the FAQ page on our homepage and scroll to the button :)